Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.

2015.08.02

As I understand, the a and u are both long in the German manner. In English vowels: SFAAAHR-toor. And the little t is not aspirated: just a cold click on the top of the mouth, no spittle, like switching off a light.

Very fun to say. I hear the word behind me, in a deep yet female voice, and imagine turning to see a black-haired, white skinned young woman in iridescent dark green standing on a black volcanic plain that rushes away toward black mountains. (No, not a goth, dudes! She was there before goths were invented, though the Goths had been ...) In the distance, a horde of men in black armor on black horses flow over the black plain, only the spears and buckles glittering silver under the moon. Racing toward us perhaps, but not closing the gap; there is time to say SVAR-tur, SVAR-tur, SVAR-tur many times before they arrive.

The pleasure of starting into any new language is the discovery of sounds. And as always, you start with approximations, quick hits on how to use your mouth, however trained, to get to a sound that is fun to say. (Whether it's accurate can wait for another day.) In the case of Icelandic, what I hear is what German would sound like if Germany were bigger, emptier, less forested -- more like Iceland, in other words. Icelandic seems designed to bounce off of far, sheer walls of granite, and return sounding like the voice of a Norse god -- oceanic vowels, sibilants, and trills rolling over each other like clashing armies or lava flows, each phoneme annihilating the last as though it had never been.

(Except for all the little syllables that just vanish in spoken text, but are still there, confusing me, on the page.)

I've just closed the deal for a visit to Reykjavik, Iceland, around the autumnal equinox. I will be in rooms talking with people about transit planning, while Zach combs the famously austere countryside for photos. Obviously I will never speak Icelandic better than the least educated Icelander speaks English by the age of five. The professional use of learning a bit is mainly to be able to pronounce placenames reasonably well -- an important skill in my biz, where I talk about local geography a lot. And of course I'll try to learn to say thank you (Takk fyrir!) and a few similar things correctly, the minor lubricants of otherwise English conversations that tell the locals I know where I am.

The linguist John McWhorter pointed out, as I'm sure many others have, that the languages of conquerors and centralized administrators tend to get stripped of complexity. This is because people having to learn the language as adults (the conquered, in one sense or another) will outnumber its native speakers, so their simplifications will gradually penetrate the language. We can all see this happening to English now, but the same thing has happened to all conquering tongues -- Latin, Spanish, Persian, Mandarin, Arabic -- at least in their standard forms. By contrast, non-conquering languages, especially those with relatively few speakers, can be infinitely complex, opaque and counterintuitive, because almost nobody learns them as adults. Practically everyone who speaks them learned them as children, and children can learn anything without needing it to make sense.

I can already feel that about Icelandic as compared, say, to standard German. I've only been studying it for two hours and the phonics are clearly far more mysterious and subtle. There's some weird thing going with double-L; in Icelandic it sounds like t. There's also a terminal nn that sounds a lot like t. There are places where r sounds like s. In fact, a lot of Icelandic consonants seem to seize up, turn into dusty clicks and gasps of Beckettian austerity, especially at the ends of words. Yet I know that each of them is subtly different to the native, and I will have to do my best to get them all straight.

But I'll also say fun words for fun. And if some tall guy with a deep voice is walking around Reykjavik at night intoning SVAR-tur! SVAR-tur! (black! black!) they'll probably just identify him as another existentialist tourist in search of the true platonic form of darkness. They must get people like that all the time.

2012.12.25

My job is constant travel, so the question is always: "How do I know where I am?"

GPS is not the answer, because what I really mean, I think, is:"How do I be with (or in) the fact of where I am?" How do I escape the erasing effect of travel, the grim sensation of "no matter where you go, there you are"? How do I arrive in each moment with some joy at new possibilities, new sensations, that couldn't have been gotten where I was?

One answer is to fixate on people, and on certain pleasures of human contact that technology can't replicate. Another is to fixate on landscape, which this blog shows me to be doing constantly. For example, my obsession with botany, and especially plant identification, is simply a way to see immediately how this place is different from that one. An awareness of evolutionary patterns, manifested in the genetic "closeness" of physically distant plants, fuses the necessary sensation of distinction and uniqueness with the equally necessary awareness of connectedness to forge a felt sense of "here."

Another is to touch the water.

It's been my ritual for many years that when visiting a coastal city, I must touch the water. I'm not much of a swimmer or beach-lazer, so this contact requres an intentional ritual. The situation doesn't much matter, though obviously a relatively pristine beach is preferable.

You would think, from all I've said, that the real purpose must be to contact something unique to this location. But salt water is everywhere, and feels and tastes pretty much the same everywhere. Indeed, nothing is more homogenizing, more crushing of distinctions that matter to us, than the sea. It helps that cold saltwater is a clammy, unpleasant sensation; like all metaphorical voids, the sea is not there to please us.

I touch plants, too. I'm not literally a treehugger but while walking I often reach out to touch leaves, and occasionally pause if that sensation is interesting.

So why water? Things present themselves most intensely right at the edge of their absence. This is the intrinsic drama of the urban waterfront -- so much complexity right up against what reads to us as vast emptiness. Touching a large body of water is a contact-with-the-infinite that intensifies the richness of the finite. So, after touching the water, I turn back -- to the city or landscape that was behind me -- and can how feel (not just know) that I'm seeing something that is vulnerable, contingent, even doomed sooner or later, and therefore real.

It's not just that I'm seeing past what the power of architecture wants me to see. Touching the vastness of the city's physical edge -- cold saltwater -- is as close as I can come to seeing the city's jagged temporal edges of creation and doom. I'm seeing the waterfront city superimposed on its ruined (or underwater) condition centuries from now, and on the landscape that was there before it was born. I can see the city's power and beauty as inseparable from its vulnerability and transiece, as though it were a flower.

2010.10.03

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is so ideally suited to being abandoned in a hotel that I have already done it once, by accident, and will soon do it again, by intention. Of course, that means I've bought it twice, and therefore had an outsized impact on perpetuating all the ravages of bestsellerdom. And that means I owe the cosmos a small apology.

I bought it because, well, I enjoyed The Corrections, Franzen's last major novel published nine years ago. I certainly didn't experience The Corrections to be major groundbreaking literature, because when you subtracted the obvious influences of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, there wasn't all that much left. But it sounded like a talented young writer riffing in admiration of his own influences, and that's a perfectly sound basis for a first book. Obviously, being published a week before 9/11 will make any book seem prophetic, and if The Corrections helped readers discover the genuine originality of De Lillo and Wallace, a purpose was served.

So I bought Freedom. I hesitated, because I prefer to buy books that appear in modest single piles, if not in singles on shelves, and it was hard to find a bookstore that wasn't shoving it at me in big standing displays that presented 15 copies of the book, face out and side by side, as though I might want to choose among them.

But hey, I thought. I admire De Lillo and Wallace, and so does Franzen, and I'm going to be in a lot of hotels.

The first time, I abandoned it in a hotel by accident. I realized at the time that I could live without finishing it, but it was my read-in-bed-before-going-to-sleep novel, and one wants a certain comfort and reliability in that genre. By that time, about 1/3 of the way through. I knew the characters, enjoyed watching them bounce around in their box, and most important, knew that they would never do anything to really upset me. They were like very small mammalian pets who are adorable precisely because they take their lives so seriously -- even though to me their lives look pretty small and, well, now that you mention it, it's kind of hard to tell them apart.

[T]he (admittedly brilliant) storytelling loses some of its luster when you consider what Franzen is employing his formidable talents for. This is yet another book about white upper-middle-class comfortable assholes who do horrible things to themselves and each other because they can't seem to make their lives as perfect as they would like them to be.

It's more extreme than that. Everybody in Freedom is white, straight, and more or less middle class, with the rule-proving exception of a young South Asian woman whose purpose is to be the light of Walter Berglund's late middle age. She makes him feel young again, encourages his idealism, and therefore dies in a car crash as soon as the time comes for Walter's family to come back together for a happy ending -- all well-trodden clichés for a feminine Other. This woman has a sparking personality and intelligence and interesting flaws, but of course we see nothing of her inner life. Only white people have those.

In fact, only one character in the novel could even be called creative or artistic, the rock musician Richard Katz. He, too, has a standard role to play: Walter's lifelong friend and sexual rival, who is finally reduced to irrelevance by his own inability to commit to a woman for more than 15 minutes. Katz does have some inner life: he ruminates endlessly about right and wrong, Hamlet-like, while deferring to "the divining rod in his pants" to handle all the exigencies of action. Even artists are a cliché in this book. Good thing none of them are reading.

It feels shallowly politically correct, in a narrowly American way, to judge a novel based on a demographic census of its characters, but I did really feel hit-over-the-head with the lack of diversity of any kind. Can the literary triumph of 2010 really be a novel in which only straight, white, middle class, non-artistic people are expected to have interesting inner lives -- and who use their 550+ pages of fame to reveal that, well, they're cute and harmless but not really all that interesting?

2009.11.08

A major post on Berlin is in the works, but may not make it in time for the absurdly juxtaposed anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and Kristallnacht (1938), both November 9. But that reminds me ...

I wonder how many Americans are aware that when they refer to "9/11," they are speaking with an American dialect, and that their friends in Britain and Australia and elsewhere are having to translate. In most of the world, including Australia, dates are written "day/month," so "9/11" means today, November 9.

Americans are used to "9/11" as a kind of shorthand designed to
reference a trauma without invoking it, rather like the word
"holocaust." But unlike "holocaust," 9/11 keeps rolling around in the calendar, so the shorthand use of "9/11" for the WTC attacks carries a slight whiff of linguistic imperialism that is clearly unintentional and yet can't be shaken off. "9/11? 9th of November? What about it?" "Oh, you mean the American 9/11."

The London Underground bombings happened on July 7, and the Brits occasionally refer to the event as "7/7." If the month and date hadn't been identical, they'd have had to take a stand for their way of writing dates against the American one. As it happens, the terrorists chose a date singularly suited to Transatlantic harmony. It shows they're not all that clever after all.

2009.07.03

A bunch of literate young bloggers are reading David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and blogging about it on A Supposedly Fun Blog. There's a particular frisson to diving into really massive novel, and it's fun to watch a bunch of smart bloggers chattering up their courage, as though this novel, like the addictions it chronicles, can only be confronted with a support group.

(A review of Wallace's book, written when I was young and foolish, is here.)

While the novel is sloppy in the way that Shakespeare is sloppy, I'd still put it alongside DeLillo's Underworld as a definitive all-consuming novel of 1990s America. In response to a post wondering why Wallace's French is so careless (the wheelchair-bound Québec-seperatist terrorists are called Les assassins des fauteuils rollent, where roulant would be more correct) I offered this comment:

To me the sloppiness of his errors is of a piece with the frantic tone of the book, which I suspect was also the tone of Wallace’s depression. I bet many people on this thread can identify with the plight of a very smart, fast-learning guy, driven from a very young age, for whom the ideal of intellectual curiosity becomes a consumptive craving. You end up with vertigo in the face of the infinity of things you could learn, facts you could still get right or wrong, the impossibility of ever deciding what’s important. Of course the book’s full of holes. It’s trying to be infinite, and there’s not much time.

2009.02.14

According to different astrologers' calculations, approximated dates for entering the Age of Aquarius range from 1447 AD (Terry MacKinnell) to 3621 (John Addey)[1].
The opening lines of "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" from the 1967
musical Hair describe a specific alignment which will occur on Feb. 14
2009 ...

An unverifiable email that I received yesterday claims that the precise dawning of the Age of Aquarius occurred between 7:28 and 7:40 AM Greenwich Mean Time on the 14th. (In North American Pacific Time this was 11:28-11:40 PM on the 13th; in Australian Eastern Daylight Time it was 6:28-6:40 PM on the 14th.) This is almost exactly the moment when Phil and I finished hacking our way through a dense, trackless rainforest, emerged onto a serene if well-guarded suburban cul-de-sac, and set about removing our leeches.

2008.12.25

Several working-class straight men are sharing a flat in London, all leading what seem like tedious and despairing lives. Suddenly, a man who used to be one of them comes home to visit, and brings his new and attractive wife. It feels like she's the first woman they've encountered in years. One of them offers to pour her a glass of scotch.

HE: Rocks?SHE: Rocks? What would you know about rocks?HE: We have rocks, but they're frozen stiff in the fridge.

This joke is all I remember of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, but it's enough. The whole play is right there. As soon as you recognise that rocks = testicles, you've got the big payoff, but as in both fireworks and sex, the significance of the big explosion relies on the little explosions all around it. (Perhaps I should just call them plosions, as they are really both ex- and im-.)

I don't have Pinter's texts with me at home in Sydney, and have scarcely looked at them for a decade. Today, reading of his death, I marvel at how much of it is still in my head, remembered the way one remembers great passages of poetry. Yet most of Pinter is not poetic. Poetry requires at least the pretense of a subject, an observing and experiencing consciousness; in Pinter, there are always at least two people in the room, and his subject is not their consciousness but the tightly-stretched cord of mutual dependence that stretches between them, throbbing.

The Pinter play that sticks with me best is Old Times. A married couple are visited by a third woman, a very close friend of the wife from the years before she met him. Was it a lesbian relationship? Pinter uses that uncertainty to unfold deeper ones, so that by the end the question seems trivial and reductive, like reducing Buddhism to the question of whether to eat meat.

Here's the opening, also from my memory. The couple at home in the livingroom, sitting apart:

SHE: Dark.(pause)HE: Fat or thin?SHE: Fuller than me I think.HE: She was then?SHE: I think so.HE: She may not be now.

Again, it's all there. The other woman's place in the wife's memories, her husband's relentless curiosity about those years, his desire to conquer and own them. Failing that, his need to build the wall between then and now, to defend his turf.

The other woman turns out to be lively, extroverted, and powerful, quite the opposite of the wife, so it's this woman who tells most of the stories about their time together ("Queueing all night -- the rain! -- do you remember?") But finally, near the end, the wife turns to her and says: "But I remember you. I remember you dead." From this unfolds a soliloquy in which she remembers sitting naked by the dead woman, watching her decompose, feeling "that by dying alone and dirty you had acted with proper decorum."

I haven't spoiled the ending, because there isn't one. After all, the "dead" woman is there, in front of us, looking not just alive but lively. The sense that this play makes lies outside the play's events, in the cords that form the triangle without which none of these people could exist at all.

I'm not usually very interested in love triangles, but Old Times is the play I would most want to direct if I ever went back to directing. It is Pinter at his best, and at his least political. If you feel like reading a play to remember him, read it.

2008.09.14

I am angry at David Foster Wallace. It's a delicate, specialized anger that I have not felt toward anyone since Spalding Gray jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004 leaving a wife and two sons and all the spellbound audiences in small arty theatres who'd swum to Cambodia with him and his ratty spiral-bound notebook. Because Wallace's voice was like Gray's, a chattering fount that the author had to ride like a bronco and channel like a flood and that still demanded new metaphors faster than even he could think.

I'm angry because both Wallace and Gray had seemed finally to say yes, I'm onto this, I'm riding this, I can be a professor at a liberal arts college or a New York performance artist and have a wife and write and publish and take out the trash as though it's not true, as Wallace wrote once, paraphrased here because the Harper's website offers it free only in tiny print and it would break the flow to pay them for it just now, that for the depressed person the impossibility of expressing the pain is the core of its essential horror. I am briefly concerned for the safety of Dave Eggers, whom I've never met, but who seems the third point of this abundant, implosive trinity.

I am angry because I know about September at Pomona College in Claremont, California, my own alma mater where Wallace has taught since 2002. I know about trying to start a new academic year in the blanketing heat of late summer, the air not as white as it was in my day but still heavy as death and vaguely smelling of it. I know how Claremont's craggy, encircling live-oaks and comforting guidelines of palms all speak unconvincingly of eternity and virtue, as though this were a theme park designed with the best of intentions by all our collective grandparents. I know how brilliant people arrive there as professors fresh from slaying dragons and discovering new particles and crafting peace in blasted homelands and suddenly wonder why, in their prime or just a smidgeon past it, no number of eager undergraduates, their ears wide, their eyes wet and flashing, can erase the sensation that this town and its colleges are some kind of vast retirement home. That in this heavy air, contrary to all the exciting previews of the coming year, Nothing Can Possibly Ever Happen Again.

I am angry because I see how a writer of Wallace's genius could walk those over-wide streets beneath those muffling oaks, as alone as I was no matter how accompanied, and lose the thread that had once raveled into Infinite Jest, the 1996 novel of 1079 pages and 388 footnotes that proved you could write about the blackest hell-worlds of ambition and addiction and abuse with a flattening, unflattering fluorescence that was erudite and yet playful and yet utterly honest and yet so hilarious as to imperil the breath, and that all I needed to do in response was to write a little review. And then finally, digging, I find that opening sentence I wanted to quote from the story in Harper's, "The Depressed Person." I quoted it long ago in my review of Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It goes like this (and the story goes on, with care but no mercy, in the same clinical tone.)

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing
emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this
pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor to
its essential horror.

I'm angry that to say such a see stark truth is not to see, and live, beyond it. I'm angry that finally, words fail.

2007.05.21

A month or so back, I was taking my early coffee in a window seat of a cafe in Glebe, Sydney's inner-west district of of New Age businesses and health-food stores. I was gazing with that precaffienated stupor in which everything in the field of vision seems equally important, when something jumped at me from a little way down the counter: a slim hardcover volume, Seamus Heaney's District and Circle. Loitering in the pose of an abandoned newspaper, it fairly purred with intention.

As a public transport expert haunted by a literary past, I'm expected to notice public transport literature. The title poem is about a ride on the London Underground.

Another level down, the platform thronged.I re-entered the safety of numbers,A crowd half straggle-ravelled and half strungLike a human chain, the pushy newcomersJostling and purling underneath the vault,On their marks to be first through the doors,Street-loud, then succumbing to herd-quiet ...

Heaney is not exactly to my taste, but I had to admire the eye that could see the Underground as a landscape, and thus see the strap hanging from the ceiling as a "roof-wort".

The real message, though, was written carefully in longhand inside the front cover:

Read me!

This book is registered at bookcrossing.com/597-4079837. Please visit to say that it's found a good home. Enjoy and pass on. [Signature illegible] BCID 597-4079837.

Bookcrossing.com turns out to be a fine and simple idea. Anyone who has a book that they liked but don't want to keep is encouraged to register it at the site, write a note in the front, such as the one above, with the "Book Crossing ID," then leave it somewhere where others will find it. The satisfaction, presumably, is that you can go back to the site and trace the movements of a book that you left, and the impressions that it made.

A simple idea, yet it gave this slim volume of poems a charge of consequence. Travelling, I kept finding it in my luggage, and placing it in hotel rooms like a thing that needed my immediate attention.

Finally, tomorrow, I will part with it, probably in some cafe in San Francisco. The site tells me it began its journey in its native London, so it will now have gone almost 3/4 of the way around the world.

In a world where so many quotidian items have been sent to China as parts and returned reassembled, it seems almost quaint to take such an interest in the voyages of a book. But the reader of a great book often wants to share the experience. Some bookcrossing fans buy spare copies of a book they've loved to "release into the wild," and enjoy feeling their influence when someone "catches" it, reads it, and logs in.